womble

Who is Fiona Hill and why does she have special insight? Most of the statements in the bits that I can get at sound like tea-leaf reading and prognistication by people who may or may not actually know anything. Might be true. Might not be. Hopefully, the "spring offensive" will provide an opportunity for negotiations, but not because it leads to a freeze...

Indeed. I watched a "Army olympics" competition on the telly once. One of the competitions was grenade chucking. The competitors had to crawl along a shallow trench/ditch to a certain point. and lob grenades at a bucket without getting "shot". Fortunately for most, "close" does count with a hand grenade (even a dummy one, for competition purposes). The Gurkha guy, though, crawled up the ditch, popped his head up once for a look at the target, then, from near-prone, without looking, dropped all 5 eggs straight in the bucket 20m away and crawled on to the next task.

Not as hard as doing it by hand... I've seen digger operators do some clever tricks. Don't imagine a few sub-90 angles is much of a stretch.

Interesting. Usually, it's a case of "If Russia claims the opposition have done something awful, it's actually them who's done it." Looks like this is an attempt at flipping that into "We have done something clever, honest" when it's actually the other side that have done this. Probably. I'd offer as evidence that Ukraine's force reconstitution efforts have, apparently stood up at least half a dozen fresh brigades, properly equipped and trained, whereas Russia has thrown just about enough barely-trained and equipped warm bodies into the line to stop it just evaporating... Assuming that this isn't all just UKR smoke-and-mirrors.

So what you meant to say was "India will weather the storm better than other nations." Which is vastly different from "coming out on top". If the West stay the course, and facilitate Ukraine's victory, they will remain "on top", where they started. If "we" "fail", the existing order will be greatly disrupted, and China will be the prime beneficiary. Nearly everyone else will be losers, India included (even if the autocrat Nationalist Modi, who's as narcissistic as the next wannabe dictator thinks that India is some unstoppable powerhouse, and so would rather chip away at the existing power structures rather than clamber upon them), as "The West" withdraws its stabilising influence from the wider world. That said, you reckon China, who're vastly less dependent on Russia, but will be able to get their energy at rock-bottom prices while no one else is buying, will do less well out of this than India, who're being stiffed on defense contracts and have pretty much entirely lost a geopolitical counterbalance to China, in the withering of Russian influence? So long as China refrains from dropping the hammer on Taiwan (which is a whole 'nother kettle of fish to fry), they're much better placed to benefit from Russian misadventure than India over the next 7 years, whether they manage to freeze the conflict or if they get humiliated.

I agree, it looks stretched. But I think Putin probably is a bit stretched at the moment. Either way you look at it (Putin giving in to a pet's tantrum, or Putin using a pet to publicly put the MoD in their place) it looks pretty hooky; maybe it's something else. But the whole Russian edifice is a clown car, anyway, so there's no reason it has to make sense in anyone's head but Putin's. Just look at their propaganda, flip flopping around like a dying fish. Maybe it's the sheer confusion induced by the randomness that's the goal, like Drunken Master kung fu?

He's playing power games between Prig and the MoD. It's never been Putin who choked off the supply of ordnance (etc), it was the wicked MoD, and Prig is a Good Dog , he is Putin's dog and deserves rewarding for his efforts around Bakhmut. And the MoD better do as Vlad says.

And? Total population is a very secondary measure of anything except, well, population.

Love the detail. Thanks for enlightening me. Were you marked out of half in all your maths tests?[/sarcasm] It's obvious that Russia is in the toilet, demographics wise, and China will certainly have problems. India's demographics problem is more that they're just going to have more poor people. Yay! They win the population game! Are you saying this will instantly (7 years is an eyeblink) turn India into the largest world economy? The strongest military force? What are you saying India will parlay its young potential workforce into? Other than malcontents being played off against each other in religious and ethnic power games so that (like everywhere else) the 1% can live like rajahs?

India? On top of what? Where? And whom? In 7 years? Please show your working; I've obviously missed a lot.

If your fans are intermittently noisy, it may just be because they're having to work too hard to keep temperatures in range. As well as getting rid of the dust within the case, make sure you clean out any filters and grilles to improve air flow. Fans are cheap as chips to replace, too, so if it's just "tired" equipment, you can cure the noise with a replacement. If you elect to upgrade components, it may also be worth seeing if you can fit more or better fans, since newer GPUs and more RAM will increase the need for cooling breezes flowing through your rig.

Personally, I'd build my own, but if you don't want to, go to one of the parts sites (Overclockers, or whomever) spec your machine and they'll probably offer the option to build and even configure it for you and ship you the whole completed thing. You'll probably still get more bang for your buck, and you'll not be stuck with any "proprietary" limitations like odd cutouts in the back of cases. It will also have been spun up and any problems with DOA parts should have been detected and resolved.

There's also participation from Ukraine, Poland, Czechia and Greece that I can think of off the top of my head.

How effective were the 2-man tanks of WW2? I know technology can take some of the load off, but the enemy's use of it adds pressure at the same rate. If the link goes down and there is a driver in the tank, they're going to be too busy bugging the hell out to be able to spare any attention for offensive operations, cos they've probably been made and focused on by some EM beam that'll fry their eyes if they poke their head out the hatch (not that they're going to; it's just an illustration of the intensity of attention they'll be under at that point).

The gunner can only not be in the tank if you are 6-sigma certain that nothing is going to interfere with their telepresence. Which is difficult when the enemy knows that all they need to do to render a critical weapon system (whether that's a swarm of UGVs or a single Citadel Tank) inoperative is to disrupt the comms. The more remote operation stuff there is, the more treasure will be spent on busting the comms links and the more treasure will have to be spent on hardening those links. Also, if the gunner isn't in the tank, the rest of the crew aren't either, and field maintenance and repairs that the crew do "traditionally" become a new problem that will need solving.

Hooray. Looks like you found some sort of edge case where the pTruppen's firing position with the AT is different (lower) to the position when using his rifle. It's probably the tiniest difference, just means the little hedges obscure the PIAT's view of the target while not blocking the SMLE's from the same nominal position.

At the ranges involved in encircling something like Bakhmut, or Kherson, given UKR levels of C4ISR, GMLRS equivalents in sufficient numbers ought to be able to substitute for TacAir on eiher offense or defense, when deciding whether kettles might form. Russia doesn't have the precision info they need, and UKR don't have enough rocket artillery. But even if they did (or had TacAir able to freely sprinkle their goodies over the battlefield, this: wouldn't go away in a hurry.

I think you might be hitting some sort of sighting issue where, when the AT guy has the PIAT out, he can't get a bead on the building, perhaps due to the low hedges, but is, for some reason, able to with his rifle. It might not be meant to work this way. If you're doing some testing, your results over relatively uncluttered terrain might show that it's the vegetation that's the problem, if setting up with a "clear" shot at the same range and target type allows the PIAT to shoot.

There were 30-50km of more open terrain where city fighting wasn't a consideration. But I don't disagree at all about its predictive value for future actions. Russia wanted to run away, primarily, with inflicting casualties being secondary, so it would be hard to pin the elements you're trying to encircle, a bit like nailing jelly to a wall.

I've been thinking for a couple of days about this, off and on, and it's making me wonder what Kherson actually tells us about relative capabilities in the more conventional style of warfare. Russia knew the trans-Dnipro bridgehead was unsustainable, so its objective was extraction of its assets, which it handily achieved. In the process it made UKR bleed, at least a bit. How much pressure did the UKR forces need to exert to make the bridgehead unable to continue? They needed to make the RUS expend resources to stress the ferry supply line, and convince the enemy that they were committed to retaking the ground. And of course there's the perennial objective of killing as many Russians as possible. That was going to mean incurring losses, and burning through supplies of their own; any losses more than the minimum required to keep pushing and killing are entries on the negative side of the ledger. On the positive side would have been any significant captures of troops and/or materiel, but those largely didn't materialise. It doesn't seem like a stretch to wonder whether Kherson demonstrates some of the limitations of UKR warfighting capability, for all their courage, creativity and tenacity. Large encirclements do require the ability to apply immense pressure in a short timeframe. Traditionally (which pretty much means WW2), this has been achieved with the assistance of lots of artillery, including aerial and tracked, providing firepower advantage to permit the maneuver elements the opportunity to advance faster than the to-be-encircled formations can withdraw. Even with western assistance, perhaps that's something UKR needs to work on.

I disagree. Evade is a unique order you don't have access to via "movement" orders. You can shift the "automatic" waypoint it chooses even more easily in WeGo. The "Stop" button is great when you want to entirely redo a long or complicated set of movement orders. The "pause" button lets you halt a unit without cancelling all its orders, easier than pressing P 7 times.

Building walls will collapse if enough of any HE is applied. I'm not sure a PIAT (or any of the man-portable AT chucker) teams carries enough to do the job though, if you can get them shooting at the target. It's a bit strange that the screenshot shows the AT weapon as being employed there, both in the silhouette display and the 'in-world' picture, yet there's only outgoing rifle fire. Perhaps the location only lets the pTruppe with the rifle target the railway station? The display of what each pTruppe is doing is cropped from the image. That might tell you whether the AT operator is actually aiming-firing and (eventually) reloading.

I think you're getting carts and draft animals in the wrong order. One side (let's say it's the one that's on top at the given point) sets out its conditions for ending the war. If the other side accepts those conditions, and complies with them, the war will end (so long as the condition-setting side doesn't move the goalposts). So it's a bilateral process. The "winner" decides what the end of the war looks like. The "loser" decides if they're going to let that be the case. In between, there's lots of what The Cpt calls "negotiation", and conditions for ending might be adapted. The conditions might be changed by actual discussion with words, as well. At the moment, the UKR claim (and I think I believe them, largely) that the war can't end until all their territory has been returned. I don't know what explicit demands regarding reparations and repatriations they've set out, but those are largely going to have to be enforced not by UKR, but by the international community and sanctions, rather than UKR force of arms. So that's one decision of the two. It's up to RUS whether they'll stop at that point. If UKR is restored to its pre-Putin borders, but RUS continues to harass with missile strikes and threaten maritime communications, the war isn't over. Similarly, RUS can't just decide the war is over now, claim "Okay, you win, you kicked us back past the Dnepr" and expect the UKR to stop kicking their military's ***. Even if they pulled back to their pre-22 positions, that's no guarantee that the UKR would stop, so nothing would be decided.

Not really without better SEAD capability, I reckon. So not this war, but maybe next time whatever successor state follows Putin feels the need to generate an external threat-response for the purposes of deflecting internal criticism... There should be plenty of 'hogs on the surplus market by then, and the UKR airforce might have the tools and know-how to suppress RUS AD complexes enough

Given the official/general societal attitude in RUF towards the rainbow community, perhaps that's why the aircraft carrier isn't getting the maintenance needed for operational readiness...